Name: Katherine Brainard
Affiliation: Palo Alto High School
High School Attended: Niskayuna High School

Speed: I can flow pretty quickly, but that said, I'm sure there are debaters that are capable of speaking faster than I am capable of flowing well. So please try to notice what I’m doing while you’re talking - if I can't make out what you're saying, I won't write anything down, and if I do understand you, I will be writing down what you say.

Speaks: Since tournaments usually use these to decide which debaters in a given bracket should break/what seed they should be, I award speaks on a general 'how good relative to everything else I've seen today' scale. Basically, if you want high speaks, present intelligent, well-warranted, well-impacted arguments and weigh them.

Types of arguments: You can run whatever you like, as long as you can give me a reason to vote for it. For instance, I will happily vote for a pre-standards argument if you give me a warrant for why it should be evaluated pre-standards. Just labeling something 'pre-standards' is not sufficient, however.

What I vote on: I'll vote how you tell me to, provided you tell me how & why. Ideally, that means I'm given a weighing mechanism(s) for the round, told how to compare them in case of more than one such mechanism, and told how each major argument should be weighed with regards to these mechanisms. If neither debater tells me how arguments should interact with each other and the standard(s) to decide the round, then I have to decide, which makes me very sad. In general, if you don't impact an argument, I won't impact it for you, and so it has no bearing on my decision.